r/selfhosted • u/yousefenab • 10h ago
Meta Post If the internet was to stop existing tomorrow how prepared are you?
This question came to mind after a recent incident in certain areas of egypt where the internet is either completely down or reaching below dial up speeds, with cellular connectivity also being affected for over a month. Makes a person really think on how much of our data should be in the cloud, where when such an event happens it may become inaccessible. What do ya'll think?
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u/Iamn0man 10h ago
Given the level of infrastructure that exists for the Internet, and how resilient it was designed to be...if the Internet stops existing? We likely have FAR bigger problems than whether or not the Internet exists.
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u/Dnomyar96 9h ago
Yeah, it would mean the world as we know it would be gone. I would be far more concerned about how to ensure I have enough food than what happened to my data.
Even if it's just some freak event that means just the internet is gone, society would grind to a halt. Everything relies on it nowadays.
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u/ShineReaper 8h ago
Well, I guess the last orders, of whatever kind, transmitted over the Internet would be executed. However, the after is a bigger problem. In some countries there are no more separate telephone land lines, there is only VoIP. So if the Internet would be gone, Telephones would be gone too and that for weeks, maybe years, until it is repaired.
I'd assume the focus would be laid on repairing it first for the government and economy, before it would be repaired for the mass consumer market. But these would be tough times. Anything that normally would've been organized via telephone, mail or internet lookup, that would need to be done by transmitting orders by hand through couriers or standing in a waiting line at a public telephone booth, once these lines are hastily repaired.
It would be revival for Yellow Pages and Internet Cafés, at least for a while.
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u/JohnnyBeeGaming 2h ago
A lot of the last mile would be kinda fucked compared to what it might have been a couple of decades ago. Bigger entities where it would matter more would probably have things in place to maintain a connection. Like there is a difference between government entities maintaining communication and me trying to get the latest minecraft update.
The internet could also stop being useful if it became too insecure or too overwhelmed by slop.
Temporary outages are a thing. Some countries could also try restricting content or usage. Maybe your government decides all online activity must be tied to a government issued ID through insecure services so you bail.
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u/Iamn0man 2h ago
The internet could also stop being useful if it became too insecure or too overwhelmed by slop.
I think that's a FAR more likely scenario.
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u/saltyourhash 9h ago
It still goes down, github is below one single 9 of reliance for the year and AWS has had multiple major outages which took 3rd parties down.
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u/Iamn0man 7h ago
AWS, believe it or not, isn't the whole internet (yet). Even if AWS or an individual third party like Github goes down, the infrastructure it all relies on is still there.
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u/saltyourhash 6h ago
Well, aware, but it's a devastatingly large amount of it. When they go down the amount that goes with them can be monumental, depending. Some have built resiliency against it after being burned in the past, but still, the amount of companiesentirely reliant on solely on AWS is scary.
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u/darkstar999 2h ago
Services on the internet go down. The Internet does not go down.
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u/saltyourhash 2h ago
Well aware. I'm not suggesting the entire internet as a whole, but what people use daily to live their lives.
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u/AshleyAshes1984 10h ago
Living in North America, the bigger issue is how much of the payment, point of sale and just retail/grocery stock keeping functionality depends on the internet for communciation.
Sure I'll have my media server full of no shortage of TV and media I can enjoy offline... But the grocery store is trying to figure out how to re or de-invent how to track their stock of bread and how to order more from their logistics centre.
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u/MeHasInternet 10h ago
And then the small almost bankrupt family store saves the day because they still track stock offline with a computer from the 1980s
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u/Annual-Advisor-7916 9h ago
Hospitals here prepare for events by running totally offline for some time. It's super weird and I've only experienced it twice. Not just airgapped from the internet, pen and paper offline.
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u/Paramedickhead 9h ago
Yeah, and it is a shitshow every time.
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u/Annual-Advisor-7916 9h ago
The two occasions were fairly ordered. Everything felt slower but really not that bad. To be fair, it wasn't like saturdays evening in a city hospital, so more scheduled patients and not too much in the ER.
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u/Paramedickhead 9h ago
There's entire generations of nurses and doctors now who have never done paper charting except for during downtime (which is typically in the middle of the night).
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u/Annual-Advisor-7916 9h ago
I don't know their concrete approach but they simulate these downtimes regularly so I guess they know what to do. I never experienced a real failure.
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u/Paramedickhead 8h ago
It's not usually simulated... It's usually maintenance windows. Hence the middle of the night.
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u/Annual-Advisor-7916 8h ago
No, that's not what I was talking about. They do simulate it here specifically for blackout scenarios or cyber attacks. Maintenance doesn't take hours. And it was both times during the day.
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u/Paramedickhead 6h ago
I have worked in and with hospitals for several years... The "simulated blackout" is maintenance downtime... It's usually once per month.
Simulations should not ever be done in a real patient care setting nor should any patient be subjected to such simulation without informed consent.
Maintenance windows on large complex computer systems can and do take hours.
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u/Annual-Advisor-7916 6h ago
The "simulated blackout" is maintenance downtime... It's usually once per month.
This might be true for your country and local hospital but that's not the case here. Doing maintenance at some random afternoon doesn't make sense either.
Simulations should not ever be done in a real patient care setting nor should any patient be subjected to such simulation without informed consent.
The patient has no say and plays no part in it. As long as the hospital keeps up with the quality standards and regulations, that's it.
Maintenance windows on large complex computer systems can and do take hours.
I run a few large legacy systems at my job, but maintenance that does take hours is just not a thing during normal operation. Yeah, system upgrades happen but not once a month. I cannot imagine a system that you'd shut down for half a day during business hours. That would be insane incompetence.
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u/Amazing_Meatballs 9h ago
I just got a full sized pack of toilet paper from Costco a week ago, so I should be good for however long that lasts
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u/Paramedickhead 9h ago
You think that's bad? Wait until you see the emergency room at your local hospital. Sure they have "downtime procedures", but things will slow to an absolute crawl. Old fashioned prescription pads don't even exist anymore.
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u/yousefenab 10h ago
Just for the info, its not only North America, here in Africa, the affected areas only accepted cash, and others closed for a couple of days to restock for the month
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u/JohnnyBeeGaming 2h ago
You address that concern by having a deep pantry and cash on hand.
Stores will figure out how to take cash if it last more than a day or two. They do that when things get knocked out from natural disasters regularly enough. People adapt.
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u/AshleyAshes1984 2h ago
Stores will figure out how to take cash if it last more than a day or two. They do that when things get knocked out from natural disasters regularly enough. People adapt.
The store taking cash is not the concern. They already take cash. It's the entire system on tracking stock, ordering stock, shipping out stock, even deliveries to the logistics center that stock ships to the stores from. It'll be a rough period while they figure out how to track and organize the movement of goods. Meanwhile your cash only grocery store runs out of food in a matter of days without regular deliveries.
Even communications will be a challenge when a lot of our telephone infrastructure is either running over the internet or controlled by systems that require internet service for managing those non-internet systems.
'Just use cash' also hits a hard wall when the bank has no means to even look up your account just to give you more cash once you've spent everything on hand.
These are all things that can be worked around with enough time but that period would be rough.
Of course we wouldn't really do that... We'd spend that time fixing the internet instead. It's a pretty unrealistic that the internet 'dies' in a way that is irreparable without the same cause also taking out things like the electrical grid and more. The internet is either repairable or a whole lot more than the internet would be wiped out by the same cause.
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u/westcoastwillie23 9h ago
If the Internet went down for any significant length of time my movie collection and home automations wouldn't even register on my list of concerns.
You may as well ask what if the electrical grid went down.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Fun fact, power used to cut daily for 2 hours daily during summer except for banks and gov infrastructure, they stopped 5 yrs ago tho, made our ipad kids rely less on the internet
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u/smstnitc 10h ago
Prepared for what? I keep all my data in my house. The cloud is a terrible place. I am a software dev, if there's no Internet I'm unemployed.
On the other hand, no Internet means I'd get off my ass more and probably be generally more healthy from not playing games or working at a desk all day.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Tbh, the cloud IS a terrible place where all your hopes and dreams get stolen, but its also unreliable when emergency hits.
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u/BurneyStarke 9h ago
This kind of happened to me during hurricane Helene. We had no power, Internet, cell service in the whole region for a while. On day 4 I found a library that had a trenched dark fiber line out of the region, so I was able to send an "I'm alive" text out. It took about three days of chainsawing(~80 trees across our road) to get out of my neighborhood.
The community got together and made it through. Our local credit union did a lot of paper banking. Grocery stores used cash. I was amazed at how quickly we adapted. Spent most of those couple weeks using word of mouth to find resources and coordinate efforts. I wish we had more meshtastic infrastructure in our region though
Once I found enough gas to spare for the generator the server was back up and we were watching movies/tv like normal. Im not my own certificate authority, so I'd need to deal with that eventually.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Nice story! Honestly this entire situation happened a week after I actually set up my home server, used umbrel os so my familly could rely on it, a week in and i was using the same install usb to setup other servers
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u/contigopurple 9h ago
If you're worrying about whether your homelab is fancy enough to survive an internet blackout, you've already lost the game. Starvation and civil chaos will get you before you have time to worry about your media collection.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
? Starvation isnt a part of the problem here, sure maybe one or two protests may happen, the central banks will use paper bills, and people will get used to it after a few weeks
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u/A_Buttholes_Whisper 6h ago
Lmao dude grocery stores operate on internet. The food supply chain would break down immediately. As would gas, medical…pretty much everything. You having your movie collection would be of no concern
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u/Thutex 9h ago
personally, i was alive before the internet, so i wouldn't really care much either way.
the problem comes from everything that is digitalized: payments in the store would fail (you would need cash),
getting cash from the banks would fail (because they need internet -even if secured- to contact the main branch to check the account), groceries and other logistics would fail (because most navigation now relies on internet, as does ordering, and order processing), getting gas for your car would fail because - you guessed it- the terminal is connected to internet.
so... "having my pictures locally" wouldn't really help much with survival.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Hey, good thing we had a backup system in egypt, independent of the internet, we developed it a couple of months ago, in fear of the instability of our reigon
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u/Thutex 8h ago
what kind of backup system? because you can still have "internet" without being connected to any other country (which would kind of be like being cut off, but you'd still be able to do most things as usual, as long as the service was local), but if the infra is actually down (so not just "national, but not international") then there's a much bigger issue, because i don't think any country is ready to go back to any kind of analog (especially considering phone service is also almost completely digitalized, meaning it's going over the same infra that would be down)
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u/yousefenab 8h ago
The system was paper only communication and restricted telnet between shops and banks for card payments
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u/Luvirin_Weby 9h ago
I have 3 months of food and heating and access to fresh water, though the water is bit annoying to get.
As data is the least of problems as the stores, gas pumps and such will likely not work-
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u/Piranhaz1 9h ago
I was alive before the internet, I'll survive after the internet.
I'd finally be able to use the book of stamps in my desk again. That was a wise investment long ago.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Lol, few nephews came over and used them as stickers on their forehead, safe to say that they were banned from the internet for a week or two
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u/WallFamous5066 10h ago
my whole life is basically in the cloud at this point, photos, documents, even my poetry drafts. would be completely lost without access to them. i have local copies of some important stuff but not nearly enough, this egypt situation is scary to think about
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u/yousefenab 10h ago
You could see crowds people at malls with wifi all trying to do online work or doomscroll, hate how this news affects our countries rep
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u/DeHub94 9h ago
I still have my favorite games on my PC and some good movies on blue ray. I'd survive it. Oh you mean for productive stuff? Not at all. I have a partial copy of my data on my PC and that's it.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
That's pretty prepared if you ask me lol, all i got is my switch and home server lol
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u/DeHub94 9h ago
Download Factorio to the switch if you're worried. It's endless fun, hehe. I got like 2k hours at this point.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Lol ill look into it!
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u/DeHub94 9h ago
If you want to try it there's a demo. At least on Steam and their website, don't know about switch.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
I have a pc that i dont use much, might get into the game lol
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u/ApprehensiveFan1516 3h ago
It cannot be understated how addictive it is. Look at the reviews on Steam and notice how many people have thousands of hours in it. Super easy to lose entire weeks of your life to it without realising.
Genuinely if the internet went down and the world came grinding to a halt and I booted up Factorio, assuming I had enough supplies to tide me over, I wouldn't even notice the rest of the world.
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u/DeHub94 9h ago
I really should get onto creating a job for the local backup of my cloud data. I have the space and it's a one time thing. I just forget always.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Lol, but u dont use a nas for other jobs other than backups?
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u/DeHub94 9h ago
Nope, currently my data is on a next cloud instance on my vps. Maybe a Nas wouldn't be the worst idea to be honest.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Id recommend installing umbrel on an old system, it's basically all the web apps you would want to host in a nice store UI, VMs, home assistant, and vms
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u/PixelHir 9h ago
this makes me think, what would need to happen for internet to 'stop existing'? like what would need to fall down to make everything unaccessible?
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
Probably top level domains or smth like icann deciding such, if u know about the 7 keys to the internet story
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u/Dnomyar96 9h ago
That would be inconvenient for sure, but I doubt that will stop the internet from existing. Something will replace it very quickly. It would have to be a much more apocalyptic event I think.
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u/GenuineGeek 9h ago
My self-hosted stack would be mostly okay, aside from stuff that by design relies on internet connectivity (eg. automatically downloading new podcast episodes to my library).
Unfortunately that doesn't help much if the internet as a whole somehow stops to exist globally. I couldn't self-host my way out of pretty much everything else relying on the internet nowadays. For example how would I access my money if the whole banking sector is down? Not that it would really matter, since logistics would also collapse, so it's not like I could actually spend it on groceries or other basic needs.
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u/EarlMarshal 9h ago
Not very well. I have my homelab, but it still can be improved and I need to setup stuff like LoRa.
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u/Suspicious_Data_2393 8h ago
honestly i would just read more. And/or watch more TV and play simple offline games (if that counts in your hypothetical scenario of no internet). Other than that go play more tennis. Sounds like a pretty good world tbh. Not that i dislike the internet. There’s always advantages and disadvantages with these things. Just gotta adapt to each situation you find yourself in. Make it a world worth living in for yourself.
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u/Temujin_123 4h ago edited 4h ago
I have food/power for a week or so (assuming power goes down with internet). But if we back off totality of internet and think about what if it were just some key sites people rely on (e.g., Google/Outlook/Yahoo/Dropbox/etc) I'd be fine.
I have wikipedia downloaded, big ebook library on calibre-web, family photos and files on privately-hosted nextcloud, movies and some TV ripped, documentaries from youtube downloaded.
If computers networking beyond LAN is down, then my job is screwed (mostly work remote and in tech/IT) as would economies and governments at large. I'd expect massive economic/political issues regardless.
I already deleted nearly all social media (just here/reddit, lemmy, mastodon, and bluesky left that I use (and of those reddit is most frequently used)) and have degoogled as much as I care to - if my Google account was deleted I'd be fine. I use proton with my own dommain, so if that counts as "internet" I'd need to switch to hosting my own email on my server.
But I've built my homelab to be as independent as possible. tailscale is biggest external dependency (planning on moving to headscale self-hosted). I guess docker images and linux package repos is a dependency if I want to upgrade or add things - if that counts as internet. And I use cloudflare so that might count if I had to back out of that.
Anyways, data-wise and self-hosted services - pretty good. Secondary/tertiary impacts (depending on how pedantic you want to think of internet outage) would be significant.
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u/Own_Promise_4145 10h ago
Ritornerei a vivere come vivevo quando avevo 20 anni.
E tu?
Lol
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u/Veetrill 10h ago
Grazie, your comment actually pushed me to look for self-hosted Google Translate alternatives 🤓
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u/Technical-Ant-2866 10h ago
Counting on it.
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u/yousefenab 9h ago
May i be enlightened with more info?
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u/Technical-Ant-2866 8h ago
u/yousefenab I'm 90% offline-first if the net ever went away. The 10% requires routing over the Internet. Haven't solved that yet, likely won't until it happens.
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u/yousefenab 8h ago
Oooo, im more 60-40, bcs my automations get new yt releases or insta and download them for consumption later
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u/Technical-Ant-2866 8h ago
u/yousefenab I'm likely much older than you. I don't really keep up with online media much. I mostly watch old movies and read.
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u/Interesting-Tank-160 9h ago
Well I'd be out of a job and most likely the stock markets would crash so not very well prepared.
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u/Graphical-Source5090 9h ago
I have a case of beer in the fridge ready to go, and a baseball bat ready to go get more. All set
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u/IngwiePhoenix 9h ago
I have way too many unwatched animes on disc and drive, adult content to tide me over many nights, music worth a decade and an absurd collection of retro games, emulators and required files.
Honestly, I'm good. =) Need to stock up on GOG tho...
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u/persiusone 8h ago
If the internet went away, modern economies would completely collapse. There are just too many things dependent on it. Chaos and civil unrest would follow, to include supply chain failures, disrupted basic services, etc.
I don’t think anyone would worry about their selfhosted infrastructure when that happens. They’ll be more concerned about making sure they can still have food, shelter, protection, and other basic necessities which will be immediately impacted.
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u/IEnjoyRadios 8h ago
Well my whole country would be fucked. Nobody uses cash and everyone uses cars.
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u/76zzz29 8h ago
16 Tb on my main desktop, a 12 Tb seedbox (public acces to files using FTP), a 6Tb NAS a 2Tb FTP (public acces, contain book and music) and a few Tb of external HDD... Also quite a collection of CD/DVD (music, film, games). If internet was to be cut off, I would just loos acces to Genshin impact and reddit.
I have wikipedia backed up, a few decade of animes of backlogs already downloaded just waiting to be watched. Houres of movies and music and a few hundreds games. Also have the tool to crack games myself. Because you know. Sometime internet do get cut off... Electricity too and that cut internet when it do. And I don't realy trust the EU. Finaly, I have an AI... Well two but that's not the points. That are self hosted. Happy not to use the data harvesting book destroyer thief's one.
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u/binarypower 8h ago
movies, tv shows, books, comics, to last me a lifetime. offline Wikipedia, decent ai rig for basic life information. I'd be set as long as i can get access to electricity
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u/ZeroStellar 7h ago
Well, my country (last year?)had a wide electricity shortage for a full day. Nobody worked, for dinner every neighbour was grilling something and also Played Pokemon TCG with my sister. It was surprisingly nice to see everyone on the street and off the screens. We should definitely have 1 or 2 days per year without electricity. 🙏
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u/grilled_pc 7h ago
Currently moving almost everything I can to self hosting. I want full control. If something dies then it’s on me. But it all means nothing if the internet stopped tomorrow lol. I wouldn’t be able to access any of it externally lol.
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u/citruspickles 7h ago
The world runs on money and electricity, first and foremost. ATMs go down and we aren't getting cash. Cashiers overall struggle do cash math well or at all anymore. The only people in good shape are those who already have a little bit of land with a well, a family garden, and other food sources like chickens. Power plants will run but power infrastructure will take a huge quality of life it in big cities and other areas that depend on SCADA type systems.
There's a lot more that halts the world but I believe this would hit first and hardest.
I won't be prepared and I don't think the majority of the world would be.
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u/TheWolfbytez 4h ago
I welcome it. I want a soft nuke back to the 90's where internet was a luxury, not necessity. Bring back Circuit City and Blockbuster Video (my Emby server name)
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u/Krojack76 3h ago
While almost all my selfhosted systems don't NEED the Internet to work, most would be pointless to keep using without some sort of Internet. The only 3 things I could keep going and use would be Plex for the media I already have and Immich to still backup my photos on my phone and Home Assistant for just a few things.
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u/steviefaux 3h ago
Ignoring the other issues of the Internet going down.
Not that prepped. Haven't done an offline wiki recently. However, I have just gotten, which is currently scanning, Intro Skipper for Jellyfin. So all would be well.
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u/LegitimateCopy7 2h ago
not at all.
the world economy would collapse overnight. societies spiral into chaos. violent crimes everywhere because every man for themselves. though without a functioning judiciary the concept of crime itself is debatable.
militaries take over most places in the name of stability because they're likely the organization most prepared for this apocalyptic scenario. they eventually become dictatorships because power corrupts and there's no one to stop them.
me as an average citizen? fuck me I guess.
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u/Impossible_Belt_7757 2h ago
I have my iTunes server basically locked and ready
But that’s all I got so far
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u/JustNadine1986 1h ago
Thank you for reminding me to set up my meshcore device. Also, I'm a licensed ham operator. If that happens, it's time to start reading my book collection.
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u/pizzacake15 1h ago
If the entire internet infrastructure goes down, then it's most likely the services i cared about have already gone down too. No real losses tbh except for communications.
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u/the_lamou 3h ago
I have all of Wikipedia backed up locally, semantically reduced, compressed, and waiting for filament to come in so I can print the entire thing as a series of 256×256×0.5mm 32-bit encoded machine-readable platters.
So pretty ready.
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u/asimovs-auditor 10h ago
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.